Microsoft has previously offered two different build tools for those needing to compile code without installing Visual Studio. The new Visual Studio Build Tools package combines these into a single tool.

Couchbase 4.6 Developer Preview features full text search improvements, cross data center replication with globally-ordered conflict resolution and connectors for real-time analytics technologies: one for Spark 2.0 and the other for Kafka.

AWS recently launched a Docker container image for its Amazon Linux operating system, complementing the EC2 specific Amazon Linux AMI with a versatile deployment option for custom cloud and on-premise environments. The image is available through the Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and also as an official repository on Docker Hub.

Microsoft recently announced the General Availability of Microsoft Flow, a cloud-based automation platform that provides workflow and connectivity capabilities across many popular online and on-premises services. Since the preview, in April 2016, 117,000 people from 61,000 organizations have used the service to automate their business processes.

Microservices has a very long history, not as short as many believe. Neither was SOA invented in the 90s. We have been working with the core ideas behind services for five decades, Greg Young explained at the recent Microservices Conference in London, during his presentation on working with microservices.

To remain agile while offshoring software development, you have to invest time to make agile practices work under conditions where they are not supposed to work. Giving up is often not an option; you need to stretch agile practices by going back to the principles and collaboratively find ways to scale them and make them work effectively in a distributed environment.

QCon London 2017, the 11th annual practitioner-driven conference designed for team leads, architects and influencers driving innovation in their teams, hosts more than 125 speakers across 18 concurrent tracks over three days. Track topics have been finalized and published. Ticket sales for this year’s conference are off to a fast start - register before December 17 2016 and save £360.

AWS has recently added to AWS Lambda the possibility to define variables to customize the environment the code runs in. This will enable writing code that is clean and reusable without requiring its redeployment, writes AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr.